Then again, it might not be long before the US laws give it a free pass, saying "Oh, you're too old, it's OK if you pollute 3 times as much as modern SUVs. Oh, you need lead gasoline? oh, that's OK, you need to get to your car show and sit idling for hours somehow!"
No offense, since I don't know the extent of your own hauling/delivery situation, but delivery from the majority of stores for large items is around $20-$30. How much is just the insurance on your vehicle per month? How many big, haul-able items do you purchase a month in separate locations?
My dad was a big proponent of trucks. "It's great to have for hauling stuff around. I get dirt and bricks from Home Depot every spring."
He doesn't own a truck anymore, because when he stopped work on the yard, he realized that it costs a fraction of the real cost of a vehicle to rent one or pay for a one-time use.
Now, my uncle-in-pseudo-law, who owns a landscape business, he has an F-350. It gets used daily. But for the vast majority of people, the occasional large purchase that might require waiting for a day or two for a paid delivery dwarfs the real cost of owning a vehicle.
Interestingly enough, since there are the occasional unfortunate things that you need Windows for (especially when you mess in multimedia), I picked up a laptop for precisely that reason. I *can't* mess with the guts. It's never obsolete until it breaks, really. They just get less portable.
However, I'm also in the same boat as you with a laptop. Even though I've got the Windows laptop, I want a mac laptop. Just a tiny one, portable, something I can haul around and watch the occasional video, surf, etc. I don't really want to spend the money on it. I've got a nice newer Powermac that's not going anywhere and does most of the work around here. But... There are some things that the Apple laptops do right, like style, styling, portability. But the screens and trackpads turn me right off. I know there are hacks for the trackpad, but nothing's going to make those screens go to a higher resolution.
I'm relieved by the idea that the first Intel products are likely to be the laptop line. More importantly, after they've been out for a while, people will have a chance to test out dual booting other operating systems. The idea that I can wait and have a Mac laptop that lets me switch over to windows for the few times I need to keeps my wallet closed;D
Sure, video cards... And don't forget about all the real guts! The network cards, the USB cards, the old soundblasters. Oh and those mainboard drivers. All those people who install on VIA mainboards and get to install the after-install VIA 4in1 drivers? Yeah, you think OS X is going to support you?
Windows supports all that stuff, and arguably that's what eats up all of their development time. Apple releases most of their machines will pretty much all the hardware you need already installed, so you don't need to check for hardware upon install. Heck, I'm sure you've noticed that the past couple revisions have come out with minimum requirements being based on the hardware abilities, not clock speed. "Do you have built-in Firewire? How about USB?"
With x86 computers, you can install on old hardware with mostly random parts. Cheap old NICs, old mainboards with various odds and ends built in (or not). Who's going to support all of that? Apple, despite their resources, would rather spend timem and effort supporting their own hardware accurately. So the job falls to those manufacturers and 3rd party companies. That stuff isn't going to be built into the OS, so how are people going to install it on random, commodity hardware?
To me, the joy of OS X is that it recognizes everything in the box from the very beginning, and I don't need to open the case for anything if I don't want to. It really is a bundled product to me, and that's why I like it. Buying the OS as a piece of software and then fandangling hardware together in hopes that it'll have the drivers in the OS? That doesn't seem appealing to me, who wants a computer to just work. I got sick of building my own years ago.
Having a restocking fee does discourage flippant purchases, but, yeah, I don't really see that as so much of a problem.
I can recall ONE time in the past 5 years (where I've actually had enough money to just buy stuff, isntead of school etc) where I've returned things and needed to pay a restocking fee. I can remember a few more times where a company has a restocking fee and I haven't had to pay it.
The ONE time was when I ordered an LCD monitor, but changed my mind on the model after it was shipped. That's my fault, my problem. The amount of money for the restocking fee (about $15) was worth it -- better than spending the full price and having an item I didn't want.
The numerous other times I haven't had to pay restocking fees are all based on actual problems. Item's defective when you open it up, or something's missing? Take it back. They'll exchange it, no problem. I honestly can't think of any stores off the top of my head that doesn't offer at least a 30 day exchange/credit policy for an item that is defective. For many items of any non-trivial value, they even have manufacturer warranties, where you pay to ship it off and they'll ship off a new thing or fix your thing.
In all of the later cases, when something is wrong with the product, the consumer has very little problem getting it dealt with. When people just decide they don't want it, or realize they don't have the money, or whatever, well, should the retailer cover that? I honestly don't have a problem with a "15% fee cos you changed your mind" policy.
(of course, then you'll still have people who accidentally or intentionally damage goods and try to fradulently force retailers to replace the goods. I suppose those'll still be around regardless of any of these methods...)
The only problem is that Sony develops a very small portion of their own games. Not a problem once a console is out and running, but for launch it's exceedingly hard to get 3rd parties working on titles right up to launch. Usually they're games that have been finished for a while, so they're short or underdeveloped (as they focused on a launch date rather than featureset) or do not utilize the hardware efficiently.
Plus, they released a year after the Dreamcast, stating similar reasons, but still had an appauling launch. They were, in my opinion, saved only because they had that year of time to get some good games out against the next console's launch titles (which, again, were short or had other qualities that made them very "launch title" titles).
If they delay, that just gives the Xbox 360 more chances to really hurt them. All they need to do is delay a few key games until the PS3 launch. The more time Sony gives them, the better the Xbox game(s) will be.
Well, not being able to find a link doesn't make the technology more difficult. It just shows that not everyone is using torrents for downloading applications.
Couple that with the fact that Inkscape is 23 and available on Sourceforge (lots of bandwidth, not a very big file), Scribus is 7 mb (not a big file so torrents don't make much sense), and Audacity is even smaller, and I'm not entirely surprised that you didn't find torrents for those apps. They're far more useful, by design, for large filetypes.
That doesn't preclude the use for smaller files, mind, but there is a reason why it's quite common to now find Linux ISOs. A more stable download, too, thanks to how it's set up.
But if you look at SolidZ, you'll see that some major apps and pretty much every distro has a torrent. If you look at etree, you'll find lots of live recordings of concerts in high quality formats -- files that would be restrictive for direct downloads.
Either way, the point still stands that had you found a link for those apps, it would've been as easy as simply clicking the torrent and having it open in Azureus. The fact that there's less support for files that are easily downloadable through direct HTTP or FTP connections doesn't mean that Bittorrent is useless or nonexistent for those apps. It just means that apps that are not available through direct HTTP or FTP connections are more likely to exist on nebulous p2p applications. Nothing new there.
The beauty of bittorrent is that on top of being efficient is that it's easy to use. You find a torrent link, you click it, you're good to go. If you need to pay for a link, then arguably you need to log in to a secure site and then click the link.
What's going to stop them from propagating those commercial links around the web? Arguably, I'd say that they need to force users to log into the tracker. That suddenly makes accessing those torrents more difficult.
I do agree, though, that such a setup would likely be a lot more secure than just a "pure download" method. If they DO set up some way for users to log in and access (and download) their torrents, then that means they would just need to store a list of torrents, making it easy for users to re-download stuff that's lost.
Similarly, a business could keep bandwidth and speed up by simply distributing a release among, say, 5-10 permanent seeding machines for their various releases. Most of the bandwidth would come from those, but for popular files, it wouldn't matter if you're leeching due to the increased speed of everyone on the network.
I can see how it would work for commercial stuff -- pretty much just the same as any non-commercial torrent release with dedicated distribution. What I don't see is how they're going to control access to the torrents, trackers, and the like.
I can say right now, though, that if they expect me to use my bandwidth for a download that, in all likelyhood, will take longer than a pure straight http/ftp download, I better get a "seeder" discount.
Re:If it is going to be an "Internet Cafe"...
on
The Case for Free WiFi?
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· Score: 4, Informative
Free access to wired terminals means you need to support the hardware, maintain the hardware, and administer the hardware. If it's a cafe, that means you get to replace keyboards every week, as people spill on them.
Free wireless means you maintain just the router, which is generally a "turn on" situation. Everyone brings their own hardware.
This isn't meant as a criticism, but we've had PDAs for how many years, and they've never seen any game like this come out. I imagine even after numerous DS games come out that show innovative uses of touch screen technology, we still won't see any games come out for the PDA format that are close in terms of gameplay, polish, and overall quality.
Given the fact that the market for PDA games is essentially non-existent, I DO see the use of touchscreen on a handheld as a new and innovative interface for games. No other consoles have that. The fact that some computer technology also incorporates a touchscreen and has a game or two that use it in any new way (using a stylus to move cards for solitaire doesn't count) doesn't really make DS games less innovative or fun. After all, if they've had the tech available for so long, where are the games?
I used to say that, on a purely economic point, that HD-DVD had an advantage based on the fact that the initial discs would be cheaper, and that the hardware doesn't require two separate lasers in order to read HD-DVD and older DVD.
But that HDMI fact I did not know about. To me, that really, really hurts HD-DVD as a format. My TV supports HD up to 1080i, but has no HDMI connectors. So the format is entirely useless to me if I want to buy a TV. I just bought a TV.
Blu-Ray already fits more space per disc. I really see little reason at this point to not say "let's just go blu-ray, start retooling machines, and let the price come down." I hate the fact that Sony has its grubby mitts on it, but I'd rather have a format I can actually use without having to buy entirely new hardware. Just a player.
Me too. Exact same thing, actually. Lots of fun, got to hunting triforces, and figured "this is boring. I'm going to play another game for a while." Never got back to it.
Everyone says the last fight and ending are meh, anyway;D
See, that's how I've seen MS's push for Windows as well. Well, even more than just Windows. The latest features in Office have all been for corporations and multi-user editing of the same document sets.
It's just that Windows seems to split itself. For consumers, it adopts the "flashy interface" with no real use or substance. For corporations, it adopts the secure connections and administration. Obviously, for consumers, a flashy interface isn't nearly enough to make them pay for an upgrade. But what about the power users? Where's the OS-level integration of sound and video as a data format (not for DRM, locked-in Windows Format files only)?
One of the things that got me so interested in OS X was CoreAudio, which is just fantastic. One of the things that got me doubly interested in 10.4 was CoreImage, and what that means for video work. These are actual uses for data that people want to have. Windows seems to be ignoring it for corporate environment oriented features.
Is that bad? No, there's a lot of money in the corporate sector. Does it bode well for general consumers? I'd say no. It can't hurt, IMO, but it's nothing that many people want from an OS. To me, I can see why the reported number of Mac owners is significantly higher when you look at pure consumers compared to consumers+businesses.
They're back in 10.4. Incidentally, the mv and cp commands in 10.4 are also updated so that they will copy and move the resource forks.
Luckily the system is generally smart enough so that it will look at the file extension if it can't figure out what it is. So losing a resource fork just means that any fancy forks are lost, and you default to "basic" ones.
Wireless, especially Bluetooth, has been far more popular in the EU region compared to the US. You and the AC who replied to me are both EU-based, where cellular service is MUCH stronger than in the US and the tech that accompanies that is similarly much more advanced.
Here, Bluetooth up until just, really, a few months ago, was just for headsets. Sure, some laptops came with it, but they wouldn't even sync up with your phones in many cases. Not to mention that it has been more expensive in the US for longer.
In talking with my EU buddies, the whole wireless thing caught on there quickly and held firm, bringing prices down a lot faster. Wireless routers are still $70 around here unless you happen to find a rebate.
Those wifi 802.11g dongles are just now in the $20 price range. 8 months ago, they were all over $40. My girlfriend settled on an 802.11b dongle because it was $25. Now the 802.11g ones are cheaper. So yes, prices were higher for longer in the US, and are now starting to come in line more with what you find in the EU.
One of the few times where you europeans actually got cheaper prices before us on computer tech;D
Yeah, it's pretty easy. I've got a 40 GB iPod. I ripped all my music at 192 AAC. About 300 CDs, around "5000 songs," and I've got 31 gigs filled. I have not ripped about 5-10% of my CDs because they're old or cheesy, stuff I wouldn't ever really want to listen to now. I haven't bought many CDs at all since graduating college, though -- harder to find stuff I like. But that's mostly because I'm interested in one or two main genres, and then little bubbles in other side genres. If I had an interest in anything a little more mainstream, well, heck, I'd probably need to get a bigger iPod.
The catch, of course, is whether or not anyone would really want to listen to all of that. I'll rip an entire album, but there's always those albums that you really just want 2-3 songs off of and will never listen to the rest.
Incidentally, so that I didn't get too close to filling up my iPod, all of my 90's "alternative" stuff I re-encoded down to 128 AAC to save about 2 gigs of space. About 30 albumsworth of stuff, I'd say.
So yes, it's quite easy for anyone who's into music and has been buying CDs for a while to fill up an iPod. My iPod will only provide about 10 straight days of music. Do you listen to more than 240hrs of music in a given, say, month?
That doesn't cause the old software to suddenly stop working, though. The biggest problem with the move from OS 9.2 to OS X were all the legacy apps that would never be ported because the company was defunct.
Of course, those classic machines can still very well work, use those old apps, and get the job done. They just won't be able to update.
But that doesn't make the machine useless. If anything, those machines have seen tons of support, what with the OS X releases supporting older machines that are really quite old and slow. It's just that it does nothing for that old, deprecated software.
Supposedly coming out next June, but we know nothing about what's going to be in them.
Are they going to be a lot faster? Are they going to be an entirely different design?
Everyone says "don't install software on the.0 release," and "don't buy first revisions of new hardware." Why are these the same people who are waiting so anxiously for the Intel macs, the ones that won't run most current OS X software without an emulation layer? If anything, getting the macs right before the intel switch would probably provide more bang for the buck.
But there's no reason to believe that iBooks are going to suddenly become power computers with the intel switch. Plenty of current Intel laptops in the 1.6-2.0 ghz range, and those chips are not nearly as powerful as the G4s.
That's a great story. I love how a company that's experiencing more profitability now than it has in the last 10 years is pretty much dead-in-the-water.
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Then again, it might not be long before the US laws give it a free pass, saying "Oh, you're too old, it's OK if you pollute 3 times as much as modern SUVs. Oh, you need lead gasoline? oh, that's OK, you need to get to your car show and sit idling for hours somehow!"
My dad was a big proponent of trucks. "It's great to have for hauling stuff around. I get dirt and bricks from Home Depot every spring."
He doesn't own a truck anymore, because when he stopped work on the yard, he realized that it costs a fraction of the real cost of a vehicle to rent one or pay for a one-time use.
Now, my uncle-in-pseudo-law, who owns a landscape business, he has an F-350. It gets used daily. But for the vast majority of people, the occasional large purchase that might require waiting for a day or two for a paid delivery dwarfs the real cost of owning a vehicle.
However, I'm also in the same boat as you with a laptop. Even though I've got the Windows laptop, I want a mac laptop. Just a tiny one, portable, something I can haul around and watch the occasional video, surf, etc. I don't really want to spend the money on it. I've got a nice newer Powermac that's not going anywhere and does most of the work around here. But... There are some things that the Apple laptops do right, like style, styling, portability. But the screens and trackpads turn me right off. I know there are hacks for the trackpad, but nothing's going to make those screens go to a higher resolution.
I'm relieved by the idea that the first Intel products are likely to be the laptop line. More importantly, after they've been out for a while, people will have a chance to test out dual booting other operating systems. The idea that I can wait and have a Mac laptop that lets me switch over to windows for the few times I need to keeps my wallet closed ;D
Windows supports all that stuff, and arguably that's what eats up all of their development time. Apple releases most of their machines will pretty much all the hardware you need already installed, so you don't need to check for hardware upon install. Heck, I'm sure you've noticed that the past couple revisions have come out with minimum requirements being based on the hardware abilities, not clock speed. "Do you have built-in Firewire? How about USB?"
With x86 computers, you can install on old hardware with mostly random parts. Cheap old NICs, old mainboards with various odds and ends built in (or not). Who's going to support all of that? Apple, despite their resources, would rather spend timem and effort supporting their own hardware accurately. So the job falls to those manufacturers and 3rd party companies. That stuff isn't going to be built into the OS, so how are people going to install it on random, commodity hardware?
To me, the joy of OS X is that it recognizes everything in the box from the very beginning, and I don't need to open the case for anything if I don't want to. It really is a bundled product to me, and that's why I like it. Buying the OS as a piece of software and then fandangling hardware together in hopes that it'll have the drivers in the OS? That doesn't seem appealing to me, who wants a computer to just work. I got sick of building my own years ago.
I can recall ONE time in the past 5 years (where I've actually had enough money to just buy stuff, isntead of school etc) where I've returned things and needed to pay a restocking fee. I can remember a few more times where a company has a restocking fee and I haven't had to pay it.
The ONE time was when I ordered an LCD monitor, but changed my mind on the model after it was shipped. That's my fault, my problem. The amount of money for the restocking fee (about $15) was worth it -- better than spending the full price and having an item I didn't want.
The numerous other times I haven't had to pay restocking fees are all based on actual problems. Item's defective when you open it up, or something's missing? Take it back. They'll exchange it, no problem. I honestly can't think of any stores off the top of my head that doesn't offer at least a 30 day exchange/credit policy for an item that is defective. For many items of any non-trivial value, they even have manufacturer warranties, where you pay to ship it off and they'll ship off a new thing or fix your thing.
In all of the later cases, when something is wrong with the product, the consumer has very little problem getting it dealt with. When people just decide they don't want it, or realize they don't have the money, or whatever, well, should the retailer cover that? I honestly don't have a problem with a "15% fee cos you changed your mind" policy.
(of course, then you'll still have people who accidentally or intentionally damage goods and try to fradulently force retailers to replace the goods. I suppose those'll still be around regardless of any of these methods...)
Plus, they released a year after the Dreamcast, stating similar reasons, but still had an appauling launch. They were, in my opinion, saved only because they had that year of time to get some good games out against the next console's launch titles (which, again, were short or had other qualities that made them very "launch title" titles).
If they delay, that just gives the Xbox 360 more chances to really hurt them. All they need to do is delay a few key games until the PS3 launch. The more time Sony gives them, the better the Xbox game(s) will be.
Not in Baltimore, where the rat population rules with an iron fist. Woe is the cat who finds itself on the wrong side of a menacing Rattus.
If it requires adding, would it break compatibility?
Couple that with the fact that Inkscape is 23 and available on Sourceforge (lots of bandwidth, not a very big file), Scribus is 7 mb (not a big file so torrents don't make much sense), and Audacity is even smaller, and I'm not entirely surprised that you didn't find torrents for those apps. They're far more useful, by design, for large filetypes.
That doesn't preclude the use for smaller files, mind, but there is a reason why it's quite common to now find Linux ISOs. A more stable download, too, thanks to how it's set up.
But if you look at SolidZ, you'll see that some major apps and pretty much every distro has a torrent. If you look at etree, you'll find lots of live recordings of concerts in high quality formats -- files that would be restrictive for direct downloads.
Either way, the point still stands that had you found a link for those apps, it would've been as easy as simply clicking the torrent and having it open in Azureus. The fact that there's less support for files that are easily downloadable through direct HTTP or FTP connections doesn't mean that Bittorrent is useless or nonexistent for those apps. It just means that apps that are not available through direct HTTP or FTP connections are more likely to exist on nebulous p2p applications. Nothing new there.
What's going to stop them from propagating those commercial links around the web? Arguably, I'd say that they need to force users to log into the tracker. That suddenly makes accessing those torrents more difficult.
I do agree, though, that such a setup would likely be a lot more secure than just a "pure download" method. If they DO set up some way for users to log in and access (and download) their torrents, then that means they would just need to store a list of torrents, making it easy for users to re-download stuff that's lost.
Similarly, a business could keep bandwidth and speed up by simply distributing a release among, say, 5-10 permanent seeding machines for their various releases. Most of the bandwidth would come from those, but for popular files, it wouldn't matter if you're leeching due to the increased speed of everyone on the network.
I can see how it would work for commercial stuff -- pretty much just the same as any non-commercial torrent release with dedicated distribution. What I don't see is how they're going to control access to the torrents, trackers, and the like.
I can say right now, though, that if they expect me to use my bandwidth for a download that, in all likelyhood, will take longer than a pure straight http/ftp download, I better get a "seeder" discount.
Free wireless means you maintain just the router, which is generally a "turn on" situation. Everyone brings their own hardware.
I'd say that's a pretty huge difference.
What about the moon? And would you eat it if it were made of spare ribs?
Firefox has been doing that for as long as I can remember. Middle click a link - opens in new tab in the background.
Given the fact that the market for PDA games is essentially non-existent, I DO see the use of touchscreen on a handheld as a new and innovative interface for games. No other consoles have that. The fact that some computer technology also incorporates a touchscreen and has a game or two that use it in any new way (using a stylus to move cards for solitaire doesn't count) doesn't really make DS games less innovative or fun. After all, if they've had the tech available for so long, where are the games?
If consumers don't buy it, it doesn't matter what the film makers prefer.
But that HDMI fact I did not know about. To me, that really, really hurts HD-DVD as a format. My TV supports HD up to 1080i, but has no HDMI connectors. So the format is entirely useless to me if I want to buy a TV. I just bought a TV.
Blu-Ray already fits more space per disc. I really see little reason at this point to not say "let's just go blu-ray, start retooling machines, and let the price come down." I hate the fact that Sony has its grubby mitts on it, but I'd rather have a format I can actually use without having to buy entirely new hardware. Just a player.
Everyone says the last fight and ending are meh, anyway ;D
It's just that Windows seems to split itself. For consumers, it adopts the "flashy interface" with no real use or substance. For corporations, it adopts the secure connections and administration. Obviously, for consumers, a flashy interface isn't nearly enough to make them pay for an upgrade. But what about the power users? Where's the OS-level integration of sound and video as a data format (not for DRM, locked-in Windows Format files only)?
One of the things that got me so interested in OS X was CoreAudio, which is just fantastic. One of the things that got me doubly interested in 10.4 was CoreImage, and what that means for video work. These are actual uses for data that people want to have. Windows seems to be ignoring it for corporate environment oriented features.
Is that bad? No, there's a lot of money in the corporate sector. Does it bode well for general consumers? I'd say no. It can't hurt, IMO, but it's nothing that many people want from an OS. To me, I can see why the reported number of Mac owners is significantly higher when you look at pure consumers compared to consumers+businesses.
Just finding files does nothing to help me actually USE the files!
Luckily the system is generally smart enough so that it will look at the file extension if it can't figure out what it is. So losing a resource fork just means that any fancy forks are lost, and you default to "basic" ones.
Here, Bluetooth up until just, really, a few months ago, was just for headsets. Sure, some laptops came with it, but they wouldn't even sync up with your phones in many cases. Not to mention that it has been more expensive in the US for longer.
In talking with my EU buddies, the whole wireless thing caught on there quickly and held firm, bringing prices down a lot faster. Wireless routers are still $70 around here unless you happen to find a rebate.
Those wifi 802.11g dongles are just now in the $20 price range. 8 months ago, they were all over $40. My girlfriend settled on an 802.11b dongle because it was $25. Now the 802.11g ones are cheaper. So yes, prices were higher for longer in the US, and are now starting to come in line more with what you find in the EU.
One of the few times where you europeans actually got cheaper prices before us on computer tech ;D
The catch, of course, is whether or not anyone would really want to listen to all of that. I'll rip an entire album, but there's always those albums that you really just want 2-3 songs off of and will never listen to the rest.
Incidentally, so that I didn't get too close to filling up my iPod, all of my 90's "alternative" stuff I re-encoded down to 128 AAC to save about 2 gigs of space. About 30 albumsworth of stuff, I'd say.
So yes, it's quite easy for anyone who's into music and has been buying CDs for a while to fill up an iPod. My iPod will only provide about 10 straight days of music. Do you listen to more than 240hrs of music in a given, say, month?
Of course, those classic machines can still very well work, use those old apps, and get the job done. They just won't be able to update.
But that doesn't make the machine useless. If anything, those machines have seen tons of support, what with the OS X releases supporting older machines that are really quite old and slow. It's just that it does nothing for that old, deprecated software.
Are they going to be a lot faster? Are they going to be an entirely different design?
Everyone says "don't install software on the .0 release," and "don't buy first revisions of new hardware." Why are these the same people who are waiting so anxiously for the Intel macs, the ones that won't run most current OS X software without an emulation layer? If anything, getting the macs right before the intel switch would probably provide more bang for the buck.
But there's no reason to believe that iBooks are going to suddenly become power computers with the intel switch. Plenty of current Intel laptops in the 1.6-2.0 ghz range, and those chips are not nearly as powerful as the G4s.
That's a great story. I love how a company that's experiencing more profitability now than it has in the last 10 years is pretty much dead-in-the-water.